Microsoft VP Of Copilot Security And AI Joins AWS To Lead Agentic AI Charge At ‘Crucial Moment’

‘I can’t stress enough how critical AI and Automated Reasoning needs to come together to build reliable and trustworthy agents. This is the fundamental premise that drives our investment in Neurosymbolic AI, and I am excited to have Shawn [Bice] join us at this crucial moment,’ says AWS Agentic AI leader Swami Sivasubramanian in a memo to employees seen by CRN.

Amazon Web Services has hired Microsoft’s former corporate vice president of security and AI, Shawn Bice, to drive the AWS agentic AI services charge and to make AI agents more accurate.

Bice (pictured) has a total of over 20 years’ experience working at Microsoft, helping build and lead key areas such as Microsoft Security Copilot and AI Security Research, as well as Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database over his long tenure.

In an internal message sent to AWS employees obtained by CRN, AWS agentic AI leader Swami Sivasubramanian said Bice’s hiring comes during agentic AI’s “inflection point” in the industry.

“I can’t stress enough how critical AI and Automated Reasoning needs to come together to build reliable and trustworthy agents. This is the fundamental premise that drives our investment in Neurosymbolic AI, and I am excited to have Shawn join us at this crucial moment,” said Sivasubramanian, AWS’ vice president of Agentic AI, in his message to employees.

“Shawn will report directly to me and lead our Automated Reasoning Group to double down on our Neurosymbolic AI initiatives,” he added.

Bice spent the last four years at Microsoft where he led AI Security Research, Microsoft Security Copilot, Microsoft Sentinel Platform and the Microsoft Security Store.

Bice also spent 14 years at Microsoft from 2001 to 2016 in various leadership roles, including general manager of Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure SQL Virtual Machines, Azure HDInsight, DocumentDB, SQL Linux, PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Bice officially became vice president of AWS AI Services on May 11.

Bice Is A Former AWS Executive

Interestingly, Bice left Microsoft in 2016 to become AWS vice president of databases.

“Many of you may know Shawn from his previous tenure at AWS, where he built and scaled our database services business into one of the fastest-growing segments at Amazon,” said Sivasubramanian in the message to employees.

As vice president of databases, he helped lead key AWS product lines including Amazon Aurora & RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database and Amazon Timestream, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Bice also did a two-year stint at Microsoft in the late 1990s as a program manager.

“Shawn brings decades of experience building and operating cloud services at massive scale, deep customer obsession, and a track record of attracting and developing world-class talent,” Sivasubramanian said.

Bice could not be reached for comment by press time.

AWS Partner: Automated Reasoning Group Is ‘Hugley Important In This AI World’

One CEO from an AWS partner said Bice’s experience makes him the perfect leader for AWS’ Automated Reasoning Group.

“This is a field that is hugely important in this AI world because it’s basically a security check to make sure the software and AI is doing what it’s supposed to do,” said the CEO, who declined to be identified because he doesn’t personally know Bice.

“Our customers, and us partners too, like to know that when we’re deploying AI that it’s going to do what it’s meant to do and not, sort of, deviate from its specifications,” the CEO said.

The AWS partner was also hopeful that Bice, with his vast history at global cloud market- share leaders AWS and Microsoft, will help make AWS AI agents even more accurate and reliable.

“The world needs trustworthy agents. … Hopefully, Shawn can make it happen for partners and our joint AWS customers,” he said.

Automated Reasoning Group’s Focus

AWS’ Automated Reasoning Group focuses on the automation of formal logical reasoning to raise the bar on the security, durability, availability and quality of Amazon’s products and services.

Automated reasoning attempts to provide assurance about what a system or program will do or will never do based on mathematical proof, according to Amazon.

The Automated Reasoning Group uses what it calls Neurosymbolic AI, which combines neural networks with symbolic rule-based logic for reasoning to create accurate AI systems.

“Shawn's combination of technical depth, operational excellence and experience building external-facing services at scale makes him uniquely suited for this space,” Sivasubramanian said in the message.

Automated Reasoning Group Leadership Restructuring

Sivasubramanian said AWS’ Automated Reasoning Group will be restructured with the hiring of Bice in the following ways, according to Sivasubramanian’s message.

“On the science side, Jim Grundy and Kanna Shimizu will report to Shawn. On the development side, we will have a new Director joining us in early June to lead this group (announcement to come). David Nunnerley, Duncan Clough, and Rachit Dhall will report to this leader once they start but will report directly to Shawn until then to build out the core set of services that will power the foundations of Neurosymbolic AI.

On the product side, Joseph Travaglini, Mike Miller, and Stefano Buliani will also report to Shawn, focusing on how we can embed automated reasoning into even more parts of our business.

Finally, Scott Wiltamuth will report to Shawn to continue to focus his energy on the highest-leverage technical problems—an area where his impact will be immense. In addition, he will continue to manage the MLU team. Scott has been instrumental in building and leading this whole team from the beginning, and I want to recognize his extraordinary contributions.

On the scholar front, Aws Albarghouthi and Joseph Tassarotti, currently under Scott, will move to report to Anjali Joshi. This has been in the works and reflects the natural evolution of their research focus.”